Disk storage capability is progressing at a more rapid rate than the ability of end users to download data stored on disks. Gordon Moore, one of the co-founders of Intel Corporation, made an observation in 1965 (now known as Moore's law) where the number of transistors per square inch on integrated circuits (ICs) had doubled every year since ICs were invented. This prediction has slowed to some extent, but data density has still doubled just about every 18 months—the majority of experts in this field expect Moore's Law to stay true well into the next decade.
Unfortunately, disk capacity is increasing at a much faster rate than is bandwidth transmission into homes, offices, schools, etc. Bandwidth is often defined as the amount of data that can be transferred over a network in a predetermined amount of time. It is normally expressed in kilobits per second (Kbps) or in millions of bits per second (Mbps). In 1993, a typical personal computer (PC) had a 100 megabyte (MB) hard drive and a 9.6 Kb/sec dialup modem, whereas presently a corresponding PC has a 100 Gigabyte (GB) hard drive and a 512 Kb/sec digital subscriber line (DSL) cable modem. Disk capacity is increasing at approximately 1000× per decade, while bandwidth into the home is only increasing at about 10×-100× per decade.
Compounding this issue is that telephone service is generally universal but broadband connectivity is not. According to some recent statistics there can be as many as ten times the number of telephone line connections as there are broadband connections—it may take decades for broadband to become ubiquitous.
Many digital storage devices are shipped today with unallocated or free disk and/or storage space, in other words memory cache that is not utilized. Mobile phones are sold with large storage cards; for example, a 1 GB card is now commonly available for extremely compact multimedia mobile phones used as digital cameras, videogame consoles, web interfaces, etc. Many of these storage cards are sold with little and/or no allocated disk space, which means that the unallocated space is large. Computer disks can be shipped with, for instance, twenty gigabytes of potentially useful data, loaded in the factory and yet, the disks are often shipped with a small fraction of the allocated disk space utilized.
USB flash drives (also called USB key chains, memory keys, etc.) are a widespread means of copying, moving and storing large quantities of data quickly and in a condensed manner. Almost all computers today have USB ports and operating systems that recognize flash drives and the majority of flash drives utilize built-in flash memory. Flash memory or flash random access memory can store permanent information on telephones, MP3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), cameras, etc. MPEG Audio Layer 3 players (MP3 players) make use of audio compression technology that compresses CD-quality sound by a factor of roughly 10, while retaining most of the original fidelity. Unlike RAM (random-access memory), flash memory can continue to store information in the absence of a power source. Palm devices often make use of flash memory to store the operating system and core applications. Unlike read only memory (ROM), the user can write to flash memory, making it possible to update the operating system and applications via software interfaces.
The devices are most often shipped from original equipment manufacturers (OEM), with data stored on only a small fraction of the available space, leaving a large amount of space on the equipment as unallocated or free space. For example, a computer might be shipped with an 80 GB hard drive with only 1 GB of software loaded on the computer, e.g., the operating system and other software, leaving 79 gigabytes of unallocated or free space. Downloading 79 GB of data (such as games, software, videos, music, etc.) over a 512 Kb/sec DSL/cable modem, would take approximately 1.78 days to download with no interruptions. In another example, a flash drive with over 2 GB of usable memory would take approximately 10 hours to download the data necessary to fill the device's unallocated or free space, utilizing a telephone line transmission rate of 58 Kb/s. It is to be appreciated that the storage capacities and transmission rates discussed above can vary based on the unallocated memory size and data transmission rates; however, these numbers are representative of devices and transmission rates that are currently available. Accordingly, there is a strong need in the art for a solution to address the ever increasing disparity between available memory space versus transmission bandwidth.